(Aftermath of the violent afternoon on Constitution Ave in Washington DC, 3 October, 2013.)

Is it just me or is everyone a little nuts here in Washington?

I was doing something constructive yesterday afternoon and was not plugged into the global information grid- or, better said- I just wasn’t paying any attention to it. I got an Instant Message on my screen that asked me what the hell was going on.

I typed back: WTF?

The chimes came a moment later with the words: “Shots at Capitol.”

“Checking.”

A quick search indicated an incident in progress downtown. “Four shots. Pop pop pop pop. Corner of Constitution and 1st. Everything we know now is wrong.”

Fully alerted, I stopped doing anything useful and started to follow something that had the promise to be apocalyptic. Team Party assault teams attacking the Capitol? Terrorists trying to insert themselves into the ongoing domestic melt-down? Occupy Capitol Hill?

National Public Radio told me breathlessly that they had two reporters headed to the scene and that the stately Capitol had been locked down with Shelter in Place in effect for the lawmakers and their staffs. I checked off the contents of the Go Bag, just in case: two MREs, two bottles of wine, a liter of vodka, knife and that other thing that might be useful in case of Zombie Attack during a very long walk to the farm.

Preps complete, I moved the status of the bag up from “stand-by” to “Alert Five.” I don’t think you can blame me. It has been a very strange couple of weeks since the slaughter at the Navy Yard, and I am not quite over the mild PTSD that comes from living for years in a high profile target area. Add the nonsense and political theater of the current crisis and I think it sums up just about everything.

The afternoon did not feature a trip to Willow, though it was a golden and delightful one, if a little surreal. It seemed like a much more prudent course of action to figure out what was happening, and see if there were grounds to leave Big Pink, or whether it was better to Shelter In Place.

Thankfully, the police executed the perpetrator in short order, and the lock-down was suspended only an hour or so after it was announced. That was when things got very strange indeed.

Five or six of our local First Responders had mobilized against an attack on both the White House and Capitol Hill. Secret Service, uniformed and not, Capitol Hill Police, Treasury, DC Police, FBI, you know, the usual gang was out in force, government shut down or not.

All those police managed to eventually shoot and kill an unarmed 34-year-old single mom from Connecticut with her one-year-old in a car seat in the back.Miriam Carey was her name, and she was a dental hygienist who recently lost her job.

Yep. I was as mystified as you were. The talking heads were mentioning the young woman may have post partum depression or something- I assume that had to be part of it- and that she apparently thought that President Obama was stalking her.

That last bit was reported by NBC and cited “Law Enforcement Sources.” I have no idea if it is true or not. But it certainly is a function of a common thread through all the irrational acts that have horrified, galvanized and polarized the nation. We have people with real problems who have convinced themselves that there are no apparent alternatives to dramatic acts of violent and criminal behavior.

Of course the chit-chat this morning is about over-reaction by law enforcement. Miriam had no gun, of course, but I have to dismiss that out of hand. The police were well within their rules of engagement. We have established a national security state in which standard operating procedure is to kill individuals who are acting out. I understand it, and I sympathize to a degree. After all, were I in the crosshairs of some troubled soul with a gun, I would just as soon see the threat terminated, swiftly and with extreme prejudice.

(Ricky Wyatt in 2011 prior to his death at the age of 57. His landmark lawsuit set tens of thousands free from mental institutions.)

But it still makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Like maybe we should be talking about mental health a little? I remember when the great liberation occurred in 1972. Ricky Wyatt vs Stonewall Stickney (Alabama Commissioner of Mental Health) was the case from Alabama that Federal Judges decided in favor of plaintiff Ricky, who had been held in confinement since the age of 15. His “illness” was that his Aunt dropped him off at the psychiatric hospital because he was being disruptive at school.

That may or may not have more to do with the Great State of Alabama than anything else, but the ruling became the basis for federal minimum standards for those with mental illness in institutional settings. A pal commented that it was also where the persistent homeless problem arose, and I responded that it also freed my orthodontist Doc Boucher from the Michigan Home for the Criminally Insane, since he had pled insanity after shooting his wife and son and got it. Since the sentence was indeterminate, the court-ordered agreements following Wyatt v. Stickney meant the Doc was permitted to walk free.

None of this makes much sense, outside the narrow bounds of jurisprudence, but it may also have something very relevant to the fact that some other very disturbed young men walk among us. Like the Navy Yard shooter, and the shooter at Sandy Hook and one at the theater in Aurora, and the assassin who shot Gabbie Gifford and the…well, hell, you get my point.

Don’t get me wrong. Miriam’s black Infinity, operated the way it was, met the criteria for being a clear and present threat, and the shooting was justified under the rules of engagement. Still, this one is different from the other acts of deranged lone male gunmen.

I have long been a proponent of the idea that there should be an effective, quick-acting and non-lethal alternative to gunfire. I never got any traction on that when I was in the government and I am not sure why. Many of the chemical approaches to incapacitation, I was told, violated existing weapons treaties. So here we are.

And Miriam is dead and her daughter is an orphan. But the threat was neutralized, right?

No guns involved except the ones in the hands of the police.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303